


Steps like Guillotines

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [28]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Physical Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6787303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the Wives survive, piece by piece.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Toast

When Toast sees Joe coming, she gets very, very still. It’s the stillness that comes before a storm, pressure building behind a wall that she can’t afford to break. Her anger builds up like a volcano and she bites her tongue until it bleeds. When he asks her to sing, she spends the day screaming until her voice is gone. He pulls on her hair, braided into a hundred thousand ropes in an Before-styled way that only the Wives had time to maintain, until she cuts each and every one of them off at her scalp. Joe gives her the moniker ‘knowing’ when she lists off the different ways she’s going to kill him and drag his blood through the sand. He laughs while he beats her.

Toast is as stubborn as her badger daemon, growling even when they should stay quiet. Her fingers itch for gunmetal and her feet long for the soft abrasion of proper Wasteland sand. 


	2. Angharad

When Angharad sees Joe coming, she grits her teeth and sets her feet for a fight. She often wears a necklace of bruises and bracelets of white chalk. Joe seems to enjoy her fights, because she never wins them, and Adara comes back with bite marks on her back and neck, and Angharad has the same.

She wears scars on her face to prove he hasn’t won, but her dead daughters say otherwise. It’s only Capable that lifts the dead rage from her face and allows her daemon to stop her restless pacing. Capable wipes blood from Angharad’s skin and whispers gentler truths into Adara’s ears, asks Miss Giddy for a story and brushes out long golden hair.

Angharad sees Joe coming and all her burning questions press up against her like brands that she can never let out. She is collapsing, filled with a guzzoline fire that no amount of sand or water will put out.


	3. The Dag

When the Dag sees Joe coming, she goes still. It’s the kind of frozen stillness of the deer under a spotlight, of a cricket that knows it’s been seen and goes suddenly silent. Everything that is the Dag drains out of her, and leaves a frightened shell behind, a shell she can watch but not control. A shell she doesn’t _want_ to be in, so she isn’t. 

Sometimes it takes her a long time to come back. 

Sometimes she sits up all night thinking up more and more elaborate curses for Joe and his Imperators, egged on by an insomniac Angharad. “Can’t sleep?” the Dag will say, when she’s the one laid out on the balcony floor, looking up at the stars through panes of warped and sand-pocked glass. 

“Bad dreams?” Angharad will ask back, and both of the questions are answers for each other, so nothing more is said about them. Adara will curl up around Pheona, run her sandpaper tongue across the vixen’s head and back. Angharad will bring a blanket and pillows, and she will lay down next to the Dag and stuff a pillow under her head. 

They’ll lay together in silence like that for a long time, Angharad steadily moving closer as if the Dag won’t notice what she’s doing until the thick blanket is somehow under both of them, and their shoulders are pressed together, and a little bit of the Dag’s coldness drains away. Angharad is always so warm.

“He’s an old bull with no balls,” Dag will say, out of the blue, and Angharad will have to think of something worse.

“He’s useless as salted leather, all crumbled and dead,” she’ll say thoughtfully, and it’ll go on from there.

“He’s got a schlanger as putrid as the rest of him, and one day it’s going to _fall off_ ,” the Dag says, inordinately pleased. “And then we’ll be free.”

Usually, neither of them fall asleep before the other Wives start to stir from their beds, but this is alright. It’s better, says Angharad, to face the night with someone than to face it all alone. Capable will come out, take one look at the Dag sitting up with her fine hair in tangles and Angharad stretching kinks out of her back, and she’ll scold them both for lying on the floor when there are perfectly good mattresses twenty feet away. Then she’ll bring a comb for the Dag’s hair and plant a kiss on her forehead, and push her fingers carefully into Angharad’s back to ease the pain. 

Toast will pretend it didn’t happen, but she’ll tease them for every yawn they make by trying to throw bits of food into their mouths and only retreat when Angharad threatens to tickle her. Cheedo will sit quiet at the breakfast table until the Dag scoots over to her and presses their knees together and steals one of her grapes even though there are plenty left on the plate. 

And they will pretend, for just a little while, that they are not prisoners and that tonight Joe will not come back, footsteps thundering like guillotines, and choose another.


	4. Capable

When Capable sees Joe coming, she turns her face away, because she cannot bear what he does. But she stands still and does not run, because she _has_ to bear it. And she does.

Her daemon is small enough to hide just as well as Cheedo’s can, but Caelai stands out in the open when Joe comes for them, because hiding will not save them and Capable knows that even if it did it would not save her sisters.

“You’re not his favorite,” Toast says, when the sun is setting and all of them are waiting. “If you didn’t sit down there right in front of the door he might not notice you so often.”

“I know,” Capable says, Caelai cradled in her arms. “But what does it change? He’ll still take someone.”

“It might not be _you_ ,” Toast grits her teeth, her hair still wild and long, Tarl heavy in her lap. “ _That’s_ what it would change.”

Capable considered her answer slowly, rocking her daemon to calm her shivering. The others waited; the Dag pretending not to care and Angharad set safe on her chair, her belly just starting to swell. The old leather should have swallowed her, but instead it was Angharad who changed the chair into a throne, her knees tucked up under her Wife’s wraps. Toast was half-hidden by the low wall of the loft, where she could withdraw from a casual search of the Vault. Cheedo was curled in a corner opposite her door, shivering even in the warmth of the setting sun, Jiemba nowhere to be seen.

“He’ll still take one of _you_ ,” Capable said at last, very quietly. It was such as dangerous thing to say, different than the endless compassion she had never been able to hide. This ran deeper, a thing made from living in the same room for thousands of days, knowing everything about each other. Knowing too much. Capable was as aware as any living person could be of what such feelings did. They hurt, they hurt so much that she could die from them.

Toast stared down at her, face blank. The dark-skinned Wife opened her mouth as if to say something, but no words came out. Angharad shifted, leaning forward, something torn and lovely reflected on her face. The Dag stopped picking at her hair and turned her gaze to Capable, confusion creasing her forehead, Pheona’s ears pricked.

Caelai twitched under so much attention, and Capable could cool to her daemon instead of meeting the curious looks of the other Wives. That was as much of an answer as they would get – love did not buy deliverance, in the Vault, and it did not buy peace. But Capable was who she was, and if it brought them a night free of Him, she supposed she would pay it as often as she was able.


	5. Cheedo

For a long time, when Cheedo saw Joe coming she hid herself the only way she knew how. Jiemba would creep under her wraps, or fly into the most shadowy corner of the room, out of Ilaria’s reach. Safe, as much as they could ever be safe. Jiemba shifted shape almost constantly, as if they could keep something of themselves hidden by his refusal to wear one shape over another.

She passed the tallest plants in the Vault for height, rarely keeping count of days because there was no way she could, in the dark. Cheedo saw Joe coming and could not admit to herself that she was afraid. He told her not to be, but Ilaria loved the scent of her fear, and Joe would not rein his daemon in. The hyena snuffled and bit at her feet, perfectly willing to take toes if Cheedo didn’t run or scream. Loved to catch Jiemba in his running, snap her jaws _almost_ shut around him, pin him under paws and laugh. Her laugh was the scariest sound in the world; inhuman, going on and on longer than any sound should have. For every time Joe pet Cheedo’s hair and called her a treasure, there was a hyena’s laugh under his words.

Cheedo knew lots of things. More than she could understand, really, with the alethiometer dancing in her mind. But the answers she had once poured out like water began to dry up. She tried not to link this event to the Dag’s arrival, but the part of her that watched Capable and Angharad too closely, that made her wonder what it would be like to have someone hold her like that; that part of her whispered that the Dag’s presence in her mind was crowding out the endless ladders of the alethiometer. 

And for every made-up story she told, the Dag wanted to know three meanings of the tiny, perfect symbols around the alethiometer’s edges. Cheedo, eager to impress and less afraid than usual of Joe’s invisible presence, brought out the golden compass and turned the question dials under her slender fingers. The skin of them was much darker nowadays, when she spent more time in the Vault than locked in her room. 

“This one means safety,” she said, pointing one hand towards the mother. She liked the new words Miss Giddy was teaching her, words like _safety_ and _mysterious_ and _ephemeral._ She used them as often as she could, and the alethiometer fit them into niches of meaning she hadn’t known were empty. “And that one’s time, of course, but sometimes it means death and sometimes it means something’s far away.” She pointed the second hand towards the hourglass, which despite being painted so small looked just like the one that sat on a stack of books by the stairs. It, too, counted as one of Joe’s treasures. 

“What does it mean this time?” the Dag asked softly as Cheedo spun the third dial, indecisive.

“I was going to ask–“ and Cheedo stopped, because the third hand had fallen of its own accord on the tree and the slender answer-needle was picking its way around the edges. The Dag said something that Cheedo couldn’t quite hear, lost in the instincts of counting, waiting for the answer to come clear. Sun, owl, bull, puppet… once, then three times for the puppet, then two for the mother… the last piece of the answer, the wild man, held the needle quivering for a long, long moment before sweeping away. Only once she knew the answer was over did Cheedo blink and shake her head. 

“Are you alright?” the Dag asked, and put an unexpected hand on Cheedo’s shoulder. The girl leaned into the touch, so rare in the Vault, and sighed. Her mind was still jumbled with symbols and niches – the answer had been long and clear, but her understanding of it was slipping away. 

“What did you ask?” Pheona was pressing her feet into the ground as if preparing to race, her ears twitching with curiosity. 

Jiemba was a bat in a high corner of the Vault. By all rights it was too bright for him in that shape, but Cheedo had never questioned him before and she wouldn’t start now. At Pheona’s question he swept down out of his ceiling perch, clinging to the bottom of her cupped fingers and peering back at the fox with upside down eyes. 

“She wasn’t sure of the question when she asked it,” he explained softly. “So it doesn’t quite make sense.” 

“I asked about the Wives,” Cheedo said, pointing to the mother, “and that hourglass was supposed to mean ‘how long do we wait.’ But the tree…” 

“First meaning is life, second fertility.” Jiemba recited the words as if _he’d_ been the one doing the reading.

“And then the answer was so long,” Cheedo said, without pinning down the final question. “I’m not sure…” 

“Isn’t it obvious?” the Dag took up where Cheedo trailed off, running smooth fingertips around the edges of the compass, tripping over the tops of Cheedo’s cupped hands. “You asked Angharad’s question, the one she’ll die to know.” When Cheedo only shook her head, because _Angharad_ and _die_ had come so close together and the alethiometer scratched away at the back of her mind, the Dag went on, “ _When will we get out?”_

“There was death,” Cheedo said in a very small voice. Jiemba, dangling from her fingers, trembled with his own shaking. “And fire and terrible things. The wild man, meaningless fighting and _chaos_.” That was one of her new words, and Cheedo liked the sound of it in her mouth. The finality. 

“Well, all that we knew already,” Pheona said, but the Dag looked away. 

“She’s growing a crop of revolution,” the Dag said, biting her lips, already rough and too red. Cheedo wanted to reach out and stop her, run a soothing finger across the torn skin, say something like _it’s going to be okay,_ or _we’ll be alive for a while longer yet_. But she wasn’t sure those things were true, or if they were true, how comforting they would be. The Dag went on as if she hadn’t noticed (and maybe she hadn’t), “we all know what the harvest for this crop will be. Like Miss Giddy said. You reap what you sow.” Turning her eyes back to Cheedo’s she added, “It’s good to know that at least we do escape. If we didn’t, there wouldn’t be a need for all that ruckus.” She waved down at the alethiometer, and Cheedo stared at the wavering needle. She wondered if she was just a bigger coward than the others, that the thought of that terrible answer scared her more than not knowing anything at all. 


End file.
